All Hail the Instant Expert!

So I'm in a bar where I hear two chuckleheads chatting about the Olympics.

One person says that this guy Phelps knew he was going to be great at seven years old. Then another adds that the swimmer has attention deficit disorder. Some other people nod, saying they had heard the same thing. And so, despite everyone hearing this gunk said many times before, they still discuss it anyway.

It's a conversation without roadblocks, where facts fly freely because they aren't your own.

And that's the purpose of the Olympics. It's not to showcase our best athletes, but to let people talk about crap, that for the previous four years no one gave a poop about.

More important, because no one has any prior knowledge of the present Olympics, everyone relies on the same vat of information; spewing forth from the chunneled faces of wide-eyed talking heads.

Olympic trivia is like your basic Chinese restaurant: Wherever you find one, you find the same thing.

So now I find myself in countless situations where people keep telling me stuff I just heard from someone else and I want to smother them all with a giant pillow.

But then I realize that I am guilty of this too. Here, I discuss today's topics like I've discovered them, when all I'm doing is repeating something I heard earlier and then morphed it to suit my needs.

So maybe I'm too hard on these temporary experts, for I am one everyday on issues ranging from nukes to nudists. The only difference is that I'm right on everything and people who disagree with me are worse than Hitler.